nothing grows in the right direction here but no one seems to notice; i don’t know if it’s inattention and i don’t know if it’s corroboration but it seems to get worse daily. trees and plants and people and pets, anything organic within these walls grows incorrectly. the trees only grow wider, the plants only grow taller, and the pets become aerated. the people don’t grow at all, there’s no mental physical or emotional growth to be found. when you inevitably leave you will always be the same person you were when you arrived. it took me ages to recognize this. i watched the same people do the same things the same way day after day and week after week and month after month and thought nothing of it; i watched bushes grow exponentially taller than reality allows, trees grow ten feet thick in the course of year, pets get so inflated they seemed ready to float away, but it never registered. it wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that I could acknowledge the discrepancies - from a distance it seems so obvious. if you could watch the city from an observation deck, outside of the confines of our home and unaffected by whatever cruel hell was inflicted upon us so long ago, you’d see everything. you would immediately recognize that nothing within the city limits is grows correctly and but just by which point that information lodges itself inside of your head, you would understand.

unfortunately i do not have this luxury nor does anyone, we exist here until we don’t. relegation, reincarnation, reconciliation, there is no exemption by any virtue but removal, but removal feels unrealistic when you’re in the middle of it.

how do i leave? how do i force recognition? what’s clear from a distance becomes impossible to focus on the closer i move